Tag: out

More often than not, you’ll find us on the couch, in silence, each staring into a phone. Where’s the phone? Is it charged? Should I charge it now, or later? At work or at home, notifications buzz me like low-flying planes. I’m crossing the street, I’ll stop and look at the phone and have no idea what’s going on. I’m with my kids and I’m still touching the phone. More troubling is a sporadic buzzing I feel in my leg, which feels like a phone ringing, when the phone isn’t actually in my pocket. I’m a freelance producer, so if I’m out in the field and miss some key correspondence, an excuse of “Well, you see, my phone usage, it became a bit much” would merely be an efficient way to make sure I am never hired again. Then my “Dumb” phone failed to mount on my clever laptop, which meant loading music and podcasts became another hurdle to clear. To fly a 10-minute podcast on to the phone, Bluetooth wanted 25 minutes.

We held a contest over on the Offspring Facebook group, asking members to give us their best parenting hacks. It’s a much more inviting conversation opener than the dreaded “How was your day?” Congratulations, Christopher! Teach “Waiting fingers”My 2-year-old was struggling with waiting and whining for a while, so I came up with ‘waiting fingers. ‘ Whenever she has to wait for something, I have her wiggle her fingers furiously. It has really helped, and now she’ll do ‘waiting fingers’ quietly and unprompted when she has to wait. Kristin T.Make a toy condo “My 4-year-old son has way too many stuffed toys so we built a ‘toy condo’ out of 10 small cardboard boxes. We went from dawdling around for fifteen minutes with underwear around the ankles to fully dressed in three minutes flat. Anna r. Join us for more conversations on parenting hacks and more in our Facebook group!

Newport shared how he manages to get a seemingly impossible amount of work done – including writing books, publishing academic papers, and teaching courses – all while leaving work by 5:30 p.m. and making time for his family and personal life. 5 Ways to Be More Productive at Work What is deep work? Deep work boils down to the relatively simple idea that working distraction-free allows you to both improve your professional capabilities and produce higher-quality, more valuable work. Deep work tackles this by saying you can reevaluate your habits to use your time more productively, create more meaningful work, and get better at what you do so you can accomplish more than you ever thought possible. You probably spend less time than you realize getting down to work without interruption. We can facilitate inspiration by setting aside time to work hard. Stopping what you’re doing to answer every message that comes through makes it a lot more difficult and time-consuming to jump back into the task you were previously working on, even if you don’t realize it. It’s not easy to make the changes that Newport lays out in Deep Work.

Inside Farmshop, an overcrowded, overloud Santa Monica, California, artisanal-type-food joint, the 20-year-old Bill Hader is giving the 39-year-old Bill Hader a pretty good goddamn dressing down. Sitting there – regular jeans, dark blue sweater, very California casual, fork in hand, knife bearing down on steak – he just laughs, shakes his head, arches his grand Hader eyebrows, bulges his big Hader eyeballs, gives a snort of disbelief and carries on. All around town and beyond, Hader is known as one of the nicest guys ever. “I have not seen another side of him,” says Henry Winkler, who costars with Hader in his new serio-comic HBO series, Barry, about about a hit man who decides to take an acting class and become an actor. As a teenager, Hader used his dad’s video camera to make “Little horror and comedy shorts with my sisters,” he says. “You know,” Hader says, “If I were in my 20s and I heard me say that, I’d be like, ‘What? You went to a therapist? Exercise? Meditation? I mean, oh, my God, give me a break.'” Will that 20-year-old ever shut up? Or what passes for excitement in the world according to Hader. Then he says, “Yeah, 20-year-old me would fucking kick my ass for listening to jazz, too.” In fact, there seems to be no end of reasons why the young Hader would want to kick the ass of Hader the elder.

An NBA court is 94 feet wide and 50 feet tall, and at only 21 years old, Ben Simmons manipulates the geometry of his surroundings about as well as any player. Basketball isn’t played in a vacuum, but Simmons does seem to operate in a physical bubble. There will be at least 6 feet between Simmons and his closest defender on nearly every play he initiates. A Martian catching an ESPN broadcast from outer space would wonder why Simmons is the only player in the NBA with an undetectable repulsion field. On one play in Philadelphia’s blowout win over Minnesota on Saturday, Simmons just stopped. No full-time point guard in NBA history has been as tall as Simmons. There are 11 three-man units that allow fewer than 100 points per 100 possessions; seven of them are Sixers lineups, and six of them involve Simmons. The way in which Simmons is defended is unlike all but one starting ball handler in the league, a player who had at one time exemplified the same joy that Simmons evokes today.

Unless Elon Musk “Pulls a rabbit out of his hat,” Tesla will be bankrupt within four months, says John Thompson of Vilas Capital Management. Thompson manages $25 million and his Tesla TSLA, -2.45% short is the fund’s biggest position. To be fair, he’s been betting big against Tesla for years, which, of course, means he’s endured some brutal stretches. Despite Tesla’s strong performance in 2017, Thompson’s fund still managed to churn out a 65% gain for the year. Now, Tesla’s back to where it was when Musk fired off his “Shortville” tweet, and Thompson is confident his bet is about to pay off nicely. He explained that funding will be hard to come by in the face of problems in delivering the Model 3, declining demand for the Model S and X, extreme valuation and a likely downgrade of its credit rating by Moody’s from B- to CCC. “As a reality check, Tesla is worth twice as much as Ford , yet Ford F, +1.01% made 6 million cars last year at a $7.6 billion profit while Tesla made 100,000 cars at a $2 billion loss,” Thompson said. “Further, Ford has $12 billion in cash held for ‘a rainy day’ while Tesla will likely run out of money in the next 3 months. I’ve never seen anything so absurd in my career.” At last check, Tesla shares were down almost 5% at $290, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.44% was up triple digits.

It’s been twenty years since Seinfeld went off the air, twice as long as the show actually ran, and in that time, Jerry Seinfeld’s efforts to distance himself from his role as “Jerry Seinfeld” have been few and far between. Unlike his co-stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander, Seinfeld’s primary role, from his stand-up days to the show that made him famous to his latest venture, Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, has been a version of himself. Our fondness for “Jerry Seinfeld” is boundless – episodes of Seinfeld continue to air non-stop throughout the world at all times of the day, something that has made him a very, very wealthy man – but Seinfeld the real human has, understandably, changed. Seinfeld, undoubtedly one of the funniest men in comedy for decades, drives beautiful cars, and shoots the shit with his likewise successful and famous friends. Stripped of the affable fiction of his show – which was almost entirely about the ways Seinfeld did not like to be inconvenienced – it’s not hard to imagine the real world Seinfeld having graduated into a series of petty annoyances that are so far beyond the realm of the familiar that they barely register as human anymore. “Jerry, did you bring your car?” Norm asks as Seinfeld calls to say he’s nearby. “Seinfeld” infamously set out to turn traditional comedy structure on its head – no hugging, no learning – to brilliant effect, but it goes a long way toward explaining what’s missing from Comedians In Cars: There are no stakes. Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated Jerry owned a Porsche on Seinfeld.

“Susan’s going to kill me,” Billy Beane joked when I called him for a comment at the end of the Winter Meetings last year. Susan Slusser is the formidable, competition-crushing A’s beat writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Flash forward a few million words later, and Susan is still the person I most want to see after deadline. In my household, Susan has the territorial rights to the A’s while I focus more on the 49ers and Giants. A’s players revere Susan for her fairness, accuracy, accountability, comic timing and ferocious work ethic. I once approached Jose Guillen at his locker and told him I was married to Susan Slusser. Then I told him I’m married to Susan Slusser. Unless Susan had snuck into the cargo hold – the kind of thing she would totally do – I was going to have the A’s executive vice president all to myself once the plane landed.

Since we wrote “The New CEO Activists,” published in the January-February 2018 issue of HBR, we’ve seen a growing wave of leaders surging into activist roles. CEO activism is part of a societal shift that some have called “The politicization of everything.” The ideological polarization in our political system – fueled by social media – has created a highly charged environment in which business leaders are increasingly on the spot to offer their views on complex issues with which they might have little experience. “CEO activism is just one example of the changing demands of leadership in business, politics, universities, nonprofits, and other key institutions in society.” His research examines how firms manage environmental issues, occupational safety, and working conditions in their operations and supply chains and how corporate leaders are engaging in CEO activism to influence public policy on environmental and social issues. The New Imperative to Step In. Regardless of whether CEOs and other organizational leaders feel a responsibility to take a public stance on contentious issues, their companies’ customers, employees, business partners, and investors are being swept along in the societal shift toward greater political polarization. “CEOs have to realize that Millennials are coming into the organization and expecting the CEO to represent the values of that organization. That’s why every CEO has to be in touch with those values,” he said. Called “The ringleader of CEO activists,” Benioff pushes other executives to take stands and calls on employees of other firms to encourage their CEOs to speak out. “Business is the greatest platform for change, and CEOs have an obligation to use their leadership to create that change of the world,” Benioff told us.

Don’t wait until you can’t stomach your after-dinner mint: You will enjoy your meal more if you stop at satiation. Not every restaurant allows split entrees, but many do offer half-sized entrees, instead.To round out a meal, Mr. Wells never ignores the soup, which he calls “One of the best values on the menu. It’s one of those things that people always think they could make at home, but in reality, the average busy home cook rarely has time to make soup the way restaurants do,” he said. Food and budget experts alike also recommend staying away from alcohol. Be proactive about paying the billBefore you even sit down, decide how to pay. Lisa Rowan, a savings expert at The Penny Hoarder, explained that splitting the bill works best if everyone’s meals are priced within $5. “Quickly checking in when you sit down to eat, to confirm whether you’ll get separate checks, split the bill evenly or use some other method of paying the tab can alleviate stress at the end of the meal,” she said. “The more time you spend preparing your budget for these types of events, the less likely you’ll avoid sticker shock.” Don’t forget about offbeat dining optionsWith the rise of food trucks and global cuisine, it pays to get creative. “I believe it’s really important to save money on dining out,” she acknowledged but she-and we-both advise against trying to save on eating out by skimping on the tip.